Within her thesis, Mrs. Kimm investigated how sensors made of polymer optical fibres can help to increase aircraft safety by simultaneously decreasing structural weight.

Fibre reinforced composites (FRC) have been used for several decades in aerospace (e.g. at Airbus A350, Boeing 787) and increasingly also in automotive. Nevertheless, damage control of FRC structures is still difficult and time-consuming: on the one hand this causes oversized FRC structures and on the other hand high it leads to downtime and maintenance costs. Reliable sensor systems which monitor the health of a structure online (Structural Health Monitoring) may reduce weight and costs significantly. Hence, long downtime of aircrafts for maintenance reasons would diminish and failure safety would rise.

Mrs. Kimm defined technological and economical requirements for sensors for Structural Health Monitoring. On this basis Mrs. Kimm analysed the suitability of polymer optical fibres by examining influence factors as costs, readiness for market and commercial availability. Additionally, she ran practical tests at ITA. Within the tests she produced a FRC structure with textile-integrated fibreoptic sensors. Therefore Mrs. Kimm proved completely automatable integrability of such sensors into the production process of FRC.